Why the big bang may not have been the beginning of the universe
David Kashakhi/Alamy
PART of what turned me into a theoretical cosmology enthusiast as a child was watching the documentary A Brief History of Time hearing about the mystery around the big bang. It showed how the equations that we use to describe space-time broke down into a singularity when we ran time all the way back to the beginning. What does this imply about the origins history of space-time – about the ultimate cosmological tale?
When the film came out in 1991, popular science books magazines used the term big bang to refer to the moment when our universe came …